Graphics cards are the only thing (besides RAM and processing power, anyway) keeping PC gamers ahead of the curve when it comes to embracing games with rich graphical detail, and both ATI and NVIDIA have always gone head to head with each other with their competitive releases of new graphics cards.
NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 590 boasts a pair of GTX 580 chips put together, but power constraints forces each of those chips to run at a slower clockspeed than they would individually.
In spite of the clockspeed limitation, the card boasts 1,024 CUDA cores, 94 ROPs, and 3GB of GDDR5 RAM and goes head to head against the Radeon HD 6990, ATI's flagship graphics card.
The card sells at $699 and should best be reserved for only the best of PCs, because anything slower than the fastest Core i7 chip and the fastest RAM on the market is probably going to bottleneck the graphics card and make it pointless to own.
GeForce GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990 Comparison by pcper.com